Last Wednesday we reported that Jasper City Hall had given the green light for officers to begin ticketing cars parked for more than two hours along Main Street. By the time the day was over, we’d had several calls and comments, which began by a man upset there were no signs on the south end of Main Street notifying people of the parking limit. The caller was wrong; there are actually about as many signs there as on the rest of the street. But his lack of observation isn’t surprising. You have to search for the signage. The signs for those who haven’t spotted them yet are small white squares attached to the green lampposts. And, for some reason, they are mostly well over head-high and somewhat obscured by the streetscape trees. We judge the signage to be insufficient in most areas and thoroughly lacking on the end of town near the wooden bridge. People who park in spots not near the lampposts will not likely notice them. They’ll be (un)blissfully ignorant of the code, until they find that $20 ticket. The backstreets and side streets are marked even more haphazardly. There are no green lampposts off of Main, so no consistent pattern to where signs pop up. Walking along Mark Whitfield and Stegall streets, it is very difficult to surmise whether the intention is two-hour parking for the whole side street or just some sections or limited to particular parking spots. The signage is so inadequate, we would argue all tickets written thus far should be tossed out. [Editor’s Note: this isn’t personal as the Progress has a private lot so none of the staff has gotten a ticket.] A few other comments that were made to us on the new parking limit enforcement: • Overheard was a local attorney arguing that the signs say “2-hour parking customers only.” In his argument, this means it only applies to customers, not employees. A good observation on grammar but we’re not sure it will hold up in court. •Back to the poor signage, but this one is directed at the county, specifically the courthouse: There is absolutely nothing indicating there is a free, all-day parking lot behind the courthouse. It’s a steep grade up to the courthouse front door which harms the lot’s appeal along with a tram that operates whenever the mood strikes judicial/county officials. The first thing needed is something letting out-of-towners with court business know there is a lot for them. • There are very few handicapped spots in downtown Jasper. There are four right in front of the courthouse but practically none elsewhere and some blocks without any. This observation was pointed out to us for the first time last week. Before we call for more handicapped spaces, we’d like more numbers on usage and user comments. • The parking limit enforcement revealed one fairly depressing fact. When you force all the employees who were parking for more than two-hours off Main Street, several areas look really deserted. The downtown may be much quieter commerce-wise than was previously assumed. • One person commented they felt the parking limit directed at employees made them feel second class. But we would retort, the employees do come second. Customers come first. • Some people groused that the tickets were a tactic by city hall to gain revenue. We’ll take up for city hall on this. The mayor and council were pushed in to this by people who believe more open parking is needed for downtown commerce. For revenue, the city could stop speeders all day long on the fourlane. • Several people commented something to the effect “where else are we going to park,” if not on Main Street all day. However, it appears with backstreets and the courthouse lot, there are plenty of spaces, but they may not be exactly where the parker wants them right at the moment. There is little available space on Main Street to add parking lots and it seems useless to add them if they are more than a two-minute walk out of the way. People won’t use them. For us, the jury is still out on whether the 2-hour limits will benefit downtown businesses. It’s certainly a worthwhile attempt to foster the local economy. But we strongly urge the city to take another look at signage, plus need/availability of handicapped spots.

By Angela ReinhardtStaff writerThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

I decided early Sunday was the best time to make my first sweep as an Adopt-A-Road volunteer. Easy like Sunday Morning, to me, meant less traffic and a smaller chance I’d get creamed by oncoming motorists. I’ve rolled around the idea of adopting a road for a few years, then during one of my “I’m-checking-off-my-list” days I had last month, I committed. I went by the Keep Pickens Beautiful headquarters (it’s that teeny tiny, green log building at the corner of Main and Church streets) and asked what I needed to do. I found out the process is simple: pick your road and select a one-mile section you agree to clean up at least four times a year. If the road you want isn’t claimed, it’s all yours. You get a sign with your name printed under the Adopt-A-Road logo and installed by a road crew. My first choice - a one-mile stretch on Jerusalem Church Road - was available. Assuming my husband would want to help me pick up trash, I selected “The Reinhardt Family” for our sign verbage. They gave us two reflective vests, two of those long-handled claw things to ease trash pickup, a t-shirt and other free KPB swag. All we had to do was report the number of trash bags we gather to KPB. “Be careful,” one volunteer told us. “People don’t slow down on that road.” My drives to and from home were different after that. I came to realize people really don’t slow down on that road, and our stretch now seemed extremely long – much longer than I had remembered because I was imagining it in steps, not miles. I recalled a lady who spun off and crashed into a tree a few months ago inside our mile, and I noticed a patch of tire marks in the grass just off the edge of the pavement in one spot. But when my sign was installed two weeks ago - and the road was obnoxiously trashed - I decided this past Sunday was it, my maiden voyage into garbage collection. These were the highlights: •Trash collecting became an anthropology experiment. “If humans were judged on the trash on our roadsides,” I asked, “what would the conclusion be?” •Last week our Shooting the Breeze column was with two guys from Nepal who bought a convenience store just north of town. They lived in poor conditions and were asked what stood out about America. The men were shocked by the amount of beverages we drink. Case in point, 90 percent of what I picked up were drink containers. Of those, more than half were energy drinks or beer cans and broken beer bottles. Bud Light is clearly the choice drink of litter tossers in my area. •Beyond drink containers, losing lottery tickets ranked second. They were all high dollar tickets, $20 and up, and every single one of the 15 or so I picked up were coiled, like someone got upset, wrung its neck and threw it out the window. •My anthropological conclusion? My mile of road was littered with vices: beer, energy drinks, chip bags and lottery tickets. If we were judged on our trash, the prognosis would be poor. •The most unusual items I found: a flat-screen television, slightly bent and filmed with dirt; a soiled diaper and three unopened beers - Bud Light, of course, which I opened and poured out to get rid of weight, spilling a good portion of one on my gloves in the process. •A glass Coke bottle had taken up in an embankment. It was lying sideways, just a small portion showing itself through the dirt and moss. Plants had taken residence inside. I left it because it looked like a terrarium. •I had a fleeting, really embarrassing thought that a passerby might yell, “Thank you, Angela! Thank you for picking up our road!” This didn’t happen. •I realized there’s no easy way to do this. There’s no machine that’s going to dig out an old, torn tin can buried in the grass or pry out a napkin that’s partially dissolved and adhered to a log or a pile of sticks. It takes time. • I spent an hour-and-a-half picking up a half-mile of the street, just one side. In that half-mile, I collected two giant bags of garbage and a television set. Picking up trash is like waiting tables; it’s something I think everyone should do to keep from being too self-important. I left sweaty, smelling of hot beer and trash juice, but I was fulfilled and gained a fresh, albeit odoriferous, perspective. I’m just one of dozens of people who have adopted their road in Pickens, and for the Great Clean Up Month this April I encourage you to do the same.

While many folks may love the spring blooms of loropetalum, cherry trees and other plants budding out following a cold, bleak winter, those blooms can also bring a bevy of itchy noses, scratchy throats and watery eyes to us poor, pitiful souls that have spring allergies. Not to mention what that yellow pine pollen does to our cars, decks and most any exposed surface. But a little yellow tint is the least of worries for allergy sufferers this time of year. For those who battle against the stuff that sends us to the drugstore for nose drops, eye drops, and antihistamines by the bagful (none of which really abate the suffering) the end is nowhere in sight. Georgia’s pollen season peaks in early to mid-April, recedes in May and resurfaces in mid-August. Great. Runny noses, sore throats, coughing, headaches, and lots and lots of mucus are what we have to look forward to. Those symptoms provoke allergy sufferers to berate anyone who would dare open a window for “fresh” air. We’re the ones you see in the grocery stores wearing a surgical mask over our mouth and nose (nope we’re not doctors). Sure it may look funny but so do our red eyes and runny noses. For those of us who suffer from the florescent byproduct of pollen, this time of year we feel as bad as James Caan in the 1990 movie aptly-named Misery. In the flick, Caan, a novelist, is rescued from a car accident by his ‘number one fan’ who at first renders him aid. When she discovers he has killed off her favorite character, she “hobbles” him, breaking his ankles with a sledgehammer, in an attempt to get him to write the book the way she wants it. This is more-or-less what pollen does to a sufferer’s nose -- except the fine particles have no demands or conditions and accept no surrender. If you are one of the relatively few folks who get by the spring allergy season unscathed, enjoy it and when you meet the rest of us poor souls out there with red, watery eyes, don’t run away from us because we look like one of the zombies from The Walking Dead. Just take pity and count your blessings you aren’t one of us. We’re pretty sure that the pollen is so bad now that somewhere a junkie is converting his meth back into Sudafed. Hayfever is such a cruel ailment. There should be nothing more joyous that spending time outdoors after being stuck inside all winter. Enjoying a picnic in the grass, eating spring delicacies and sleeping away the afternoon, reading a good book, or playing in a pickup game of basketball or baseball. But for those of us who can’t take being outside inhaling all those fluorescent particles, it’s miserable. Sure we’d rather be out enjoying a relaxing day in the sun - but that just turns into a tortuous experience, seen only through teary eyes and a perpetually runny nose. Noses, by the end of April, will look like the falls at Amicalola. Just not as pretty. We’re also the poor souls who run when we hear a neighbor firing up their lawnmower, sending us running around our house making sure all the windows and sealed. The worst, perhaps, is when our dogs start staring at us, pleading for a walk outside. They aren’t allergy sufferers. Bless their heart, we know they won’t get walked again for weeks. Poor pooch. The pollencasters may be our only remaining friends at the end of this season - no one will talk to us because our eyes are streaming and our nostrils red from nose-blowing - even though we buy the Puffs Plus with Lotion. To our fellow sufferers, take heart and just remember - only a few more weeks of misery.

Last week the United States Justice Department dropped a high-profile showdown with Apple where they had sought to hack into an iPhone 5C owned by one of the San Bernardino terror shooters. The government dropped it after they hacked the phone without help. In a world where we willingly share tons of details about ourselves, why should the privacy of things we have on our phones matter? Many people might say there is no really harm from the government tracking us with their mass surveillance. (If you drive your car around the United States, the government could know if you’ve been to a therapist or an Overeater’s Anonymous meeting thanks to Automatic License Plate Readers that capture images of every passing.) Sounds like a good technique for catching terrorists or general thugs huh? Some believe there is no harm from this large-scale invasion of privacy - only people involved in bad acts have a reason to hide right? We good people who use our cars or the internet to go to work, come home, raise our children, plan outings, or just buy junk from Amazon have no reason to fear the government, right? We don’t use the internet to plot attacks, we’re just using it to post pictures of our kid’s latest dance recital. But even if we are not doing anything wrong, privacy matters. The ability to have private thoughts is essential to our psyche. There’s a reason we still take steps to safeguard our privacy, putting passwords on our social media accounts and locks on our doors. Even if he’s a friendly neighbor, we still don’t want him to stand outside and look through the windows. Nor do we want co-workers reading our personal e-mails. No matter how mundane or boring, you don’t want anyone snooping in your life. In his TED Talk, Glenn Greenwald, one of the first reporters to see the Edward Snowden files with their revelations about the United States’ extensive surveillance of citizens, said humans may be social animals with a need for others to know what we’re doing (that’s why there’s 300 million photos posted daily on Facebook), it is equally essential for us to have a place that we can be free of judgmental eyes. “There’s a reason why we seek that out, and our reason is that all of us - not just terrorists and criminals - have things to hide. There are all sorts of things that we do and think that we’re willing to tell our physician or our lawyer or our psychologist or our spouse or our best friend that we would be mortified for the rest of the world to learn,” Greenwald said. He points out there are dozens of psychological studies that prove that when somebody knows that they might be watched, the behavior they engage in is vastly more conformist and compliant. Privacy is important to limit government power and the power of private sector companies. The more they know about us, the more power they can have over us. Privacy is about respecting individuals and our freedom of thought. A watchful eye over everything we read or watch can stop us from exploring ideas outside the mainstream. Knowing you’re being watched changes everything you do. Mass surveillance takes away our inherent freedoms and breeds conformity. It’s not about “the good people vs. the bad people,” it’s about what privacy means as a whole. If we allow constant monitoring, we allow the essence of human freedom to be severely crippled. So when the government wants to hack into one person’s iPhone they are really seeking to hack into everyone’s.

When the internet first came around, it seemed the ultimate resource for research was available to anyone. All the facts you could ever want at your fingertips, and with the next step it all went portable on everyone’s phone – never will you be somewhere that you can’t quickly doublecheck the capital of Mongolia. Trivia contests in bars make rules policing cell phone use. Otherwise, the players in mere seconds could find every answer - from who pitched the final inning of the 1978 World Series to who was the vice president in Teddy Roosevelt’s first term. But, hold on a second, the promise of unfettered information has and is being sidetracked by delusional, criminal and misguided people who either knowingly, sarcastically or for malicious intent put out content that is blatantly false. As evidence of how for every informative source there is an anti-fact posted, consider the following information that can all be verified on the internet:

• On 9/11 – there are no shortage of websites and discussion that will tell you the United States government was actively involved in the planes (though some say there weren’t even planes but bombs) that crashed into New York and Washington. Note, this is not some indirect link they claim or oversight in security, but that American government agencies actually carried out the attack. • The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was either carried out by Israeli death squads who were angered by something the government did or by gun control proponents wanting a horrific incident to build support for more federal regulations. • A poor kid in the future researching a term paper would find numerous sites that claim the president was born in Kenya, not America. • You can find where a high school student made $72 million in the stock market and was named to Business Insider’s 20 under 20 – except it actually didn’t happen. The kid did well in a simulated game of stock trading, but not the real thing. The teen became a social media darling until it was revealed he didn’t really make the money. • A black supporter of Donald Trump was killed at a rally in Chicago by protesters last week. Didn’t happen. • Alien Abductions – there are websites that note they only include “true”accounts of alien abductions. • You can also find the Bigfoot Field Research Organization, which has “investigators.” On this site, you can read about a Bigfoot encounter that occurred between Nelson and Tate in 2008 when two motorists saw a Bigfoot cross the road. We never heard a local account. • And (the most entertaining recent internet claim) Stevie Wonder is not really blind. The 65-year-old singer has been faking it all these years. The idea of conspiracy theories and alternative explanations for events is entertaining and in most cases harmless, it is certainly nothing new – pre-internet people were already questioning whether Hollywood had produced a fake moon landing for NASA. Does it really matter if people believe man has still not really walked on the moon? Probably not. But when it is with criminal-intent is where it’s not so funny. We still regularly report cases where elderly Pickens residents are swindled by something that arrived in an e-mail or something they saw on Facebook or a website. Ask yourself if none of the above are true, why would that offer to get rich quick or taking off the pounds or about rolling back your biological clock be any more valid?